Author: Carter

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is overhauling its long-running value engineering program, moving it from a standalone function and weaving it directly into everyday project delivery workflows. Critics caution this shift could heighten the risk of wasteful spending, budget overruns, and delays. According to USACE, the transition is already in progress, with full implementation targeted by September 30. “The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is not dissolving, eliminating, or scaling back our dedication to value engineering. On the contrary, we are elevating and modernizing it by transforming it from a separate, parallel compliance effort into a built-in, fully integrated…

Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.When mindfulness and wellness come to mind, technology probably isn’t the first thing you think of — yet there’s actually a growing range of modern devices and tools designed to help you stay present, set your phone aside, ease stress, and even improve your sleep.Also: June Prime Day live blog 2026: We’re tracking Amazon deals on SSDs, TVs, laptops and moreAs someone deeply passionate about wellness, I’ve seen firsthand how pricey these gadgets can get. Since today marks the kickoff of Amazon’s Prime Day — a week-long sales event — I’ve…

ExR-2.5 robots are now accessible across North America. Source: ExRobotics ExRobotics B.V. pointed out that oil and gas operators are grappling with a combination of deteriorating infrastructure, severe staffing gaps, and the growing financial toll of unexpected downtime. The company officially introduced its UL-certified ExR-2.5 autonomous inspection robot to the North American market at the Energy Drone & Robotics Summit held in Houston. “The inspection hurdles confronting oil and gas operators are growing more acute — experienced workers are increasingly difficult to recruit, equipment is getting older, and the consequences of failures are escalating rapidly,” said Mark Mildon, CEO of…

A hot trend among coding agents right now is the concept of loops. In essence, a loop is a setup where an agent operates within a self-checking cycle, enabling it to function with greater independence. This differs from earlier approaches to coding agents, where you would launch a fresh agent, assign it a task, review its output, and repeat this cycle until your work was finished. Loops are remarkably effective because they let you step back as a human and still get more done. Since you no longer need to monitor the agent as closely, it can handle tasks on…

Jaech, A. et al. OpenAI o1 system card. Preprint available online (2024).Guo, D. et al. DeepSeek-R1 promotes reasoning in large language models via reinforcement learning. Nature 645, 633–638 (2025).Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar Trinh, T. H., Wu, Y., Le, Q. V., He, H. & Luong, T. Solving Olympic-level geometry problems without human examples. Nature 625, 476–482 (2024).Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar Rajpurkar, P., Chen, E., Banerjee, O. & Topol, E. J. Artificial intelligence in healthcare and medicine. Nat. Med. 28, 31–38 (2022).Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar Mamede, S. et al. Protecting physicians from availability bias in…

Published on June 23, 2026 by Mahad Zaryab, a CNCF Jaeger Project Maintainer and Software Engineer at Meta CNCF projects featured in this post As a long-time maintainer of Jaeger, I’ve seen users ask for ClickHouse support repeatedly over the years. With Jaeger v2.18.0, we’ve finally made it happen. What thrills me most isn’t simply that ClickHouse is now an option—it’s that its architecture feels almost purpose-built for large-scale telemetry. It effortlessly absorbs massive, append-only write streams and executes complex analytical aggregations in milliseconds, giving teams a highly efficient, battle-tested storage backend. For those unfamiliar with the project, Jaeger is…

NVIDIA’s Halos OS delivers built-in hardware safety for physical AI tasks in industrial settings.Standard safety measures built for static enclosures fall short when self-guided robots share workspace with humans. Agility Robotics is now rolling out the Halos OS platform across its Digit humanoid lineup. The company harnesses NVIDIA’s IGX Thor processor to drive its human proximity detection mechanism. Specialists verify these rollouts using the Halos AI Systems Inspection Lab to secure regulatory approval.Halos seamlessly adapts self-driving safety validation techniques for factory-floor purposes. NVIDIA invested roughly 18,000 years of combined engineering work and evaluated some 21 billion safety-focused transistors to craft…

During a National Assembly forum held on Tuesday, South Korea put forward a plan to impose taxes on unrealized gains from stocks and equities. The announcement set off a dramatic selloff in the Korean stock market, with local traders quickly labeling the day “Black Tuesday.” The proposal would require investors to pay taxes on paper profits they haven’t actually collected through a sale, fundamentally reshaping how wealth is taxed in Asia’s fourth-largest economy. 🚨 SOUTH KOREA JUST PROPOSED TAXING UNREALIZED GAINS.And this is one of the major reasons behind today’s massive selloff in the Korean market, now being called BLACK…

Vention’s AI-driven platform lets FANUC’s industrial and collaborative robots automatically calculate safe, collision-free routes while offering built-in monitoring and remote assistance features that streamline setup and daily use across various manufacturing tasks. (CNW Group/Vention Inc.) This week at Automate in Chicago, Vention Inc. is highlighting its collaborations centered on software-defined automation. The company has broadened its support for FANUC America’s industrial robots and refined a new digital twin platform tailored for Universal Robots setups. “Manufacturers are increasingly seeking automation solutions that are simpler to implement and quicker to go live, particularly as workforce shortages persist,” noted Dick Motley, director of…

Prime Intellect has released prime-rl version 0.6.0. The framework targets reinforcement learning on trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. It focuses on heavy agentic workloads, like long-horizon software-engineering tasks. The research team trained GLM-5 on SWE tasks at up to 131k sequence length. Step times stayed under five minutes. The batch size was 256 rollouts. The run used only 28 H200 nodes. TL;DR prime-rl 0.6.0 trains trillion-parameter MoE models on agentic RL workloads. GLM-5 trained on SWE at 131k sequence length, sub-5-minute steps, 28 H200 nodes. Asynchronous RL disaggregates trainer and inference for independent optimization. Inference uses FP8, Wide EP, P/D disaggregation,…